Jeremy Corbyn has strongly criticised the government after Virgin Care walked away with £328,000 of Surrey taxpayers' money following a contractual dispute over the provision of services in the county.

The private firm, part of Richard Branson's Virgin empire, took legal action against six Surrey clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), as well as Surrey County Council and NHS England in November 2016.

Addressing Theresa May during Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday (January 10), the leader of the opposition party used the incident as an example to criticise the government for allowing private companies to "siphon" off public service money.

Leader Councillor Hazel Watson said: "It appears likely the county council has paid out hundreds of thousands of pounds to Virgin Care but Surrey residents will never the know how much public money was used to settle this case.

"This is money that could have been used to fund vital public services, which are already being cut by the Conservative-administration at County Hall, rather than settle expensive legal disputes.

"I am therefore calling for a scrutiny investigation into what the grounds for the dispute were, how the county council interacted with the CCGs with regard to the procurement and what went wrong, and for more transparency on the amount of public money that the county council has spent with regard to this case."

'Satisfactory conclusion'

In a joint statement regarding the settlement, a spokesman for Guildford and Waverley CCG previously toldGet Surrey : "The parties are pleased to confirm an agreed resolution on the litigation concerning the Surrey Children’s procurement has been reached to a satisfactory conclusion for all parties with detailed terms confidential to the parties."

When previously approached for comment about calls for an investigation, SCC declined to respond.

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